A fifth of Cathy

My pals and I threw a birthday party for our friend Cathy this weekend. We drank excessive amounts of sangria and margaritas, and we succeeded in convincing Cathy, while she was sober, to put on a sombrero. To be fair, she tried to weasel out of it by saying that it wouldn’t fit, but since I also have a large Scottish noggin, and had tried on the sombrero at the party store, that didn’t work. She looked great in it. She did not look like this:

Picture by Meredith Cutler. Thanks, Meredith!

I love throwing parties. Party planning encompasses all my favorite things: Organizing, ordering people around, socializing, booze, doing nice things for people, and commemorative matchbooks. Yes, that’s right. We had matchbooks (thanks, Cathy H.!) made up that said “Cinco de Cathy 2005,” which, as someone later pointed out, made it sound like Cathy was her own month, and we were celebrating the fifth day of her, or like she was a type of booze — a fifth of Cathy.